IMHO:- This is dirty- It is hacky- It's not naturally for JavaScript devs in any way.

High lights:- You put a template somewhere in your DOM, yeah but we hide it, so that's cool programming ...- And the Intellisense (Don't get me wrong JavaScript Intellisense is outstanding in VS 2012) just doesn't assist you in learning this stuff. I think that the reason that C# is so easy to learn is because the Intellisense helps really by doing so. (Same goes for VB)- This Demo is cool, but how many times did he have to perform it to get the stuff right.- The level of this is marked with 300 Advanced, really? A Wheater App is Advanced, that's just depressing.- Where the hell is TypeScript, that would make it at least a bit better.

I know i don't need to use it and i probably never will, because i really don't get what's so great about a programming language that just allows every hacky bit of code you can imagine. Why should any one ever improve in their programming quality if you just allow every thing,

Yes this is kind of a rant, don't get me wrong I'm impressed that this works, and respect the effort that was required to pull this of. But still, I really think if this effort would have been spent on web development in general, many more developers would have had benefited. Better TypeScript VS Integration for example.

@LunicLynx:The JavaScript version of Windows 8 appeals to a large market of web developers who either don't come from the .NET world or who prefer writing their applications using a highly dynamic and functional language. The WinJS library feels very familiar to what a modern front-end developer would be used to. The various parts of WinJS are modularized so that you can easily swap out functionality using whatever favorite front-end library you want to use. On Friday there is a session about using jQuery syntax instead to do many of the common interactions that web developers are used to.

Using templates in the DOM is a standard approach used by many libraries such as the deprecated jQuery Templ library, JSRender, Handlebars.js, etc...

As you mentioned Intellisense has gotten a lot better in Visual Studio 2012 and if you want even more you can start to play around with TypeScript by Anders (creater of C#). As you mentioned it will give you rich typing and some helper syntax around classes, modules, etc. I would imagine they didn't introduce TypeScript in a session like this in order to make the examples easier to grasp without adding too much new syntax. The barrier to entry by adding too many too things can be overwhelming for some in the audience.

Live coding any demo is a risk regardless of the language. I thought the presenters did a great job. Demos are a tricky business because you want a large audience to be able to grock the new concepts you are explaining in a way that is understandable.

The nice thing about the JavaScript option for Windows 8 apps is that it is bringing in a whole different crowd to the Windows platform. Just yesterday a very talented web developer using a Mac tweeted me that he is now interested in installing Windows 8 in order to play around with making Windows 8 JavaScript apps. This is something he has never had a desire to do before, which is a huge win for Microsoft.

The great thing about making Windows 8 apps is that you have a choice. If you feel more comfortable making XAML/C# apps, then more power to you. If you have a strong front-end background and are productive using those paradigms, then HTML5/JavaScript apps are the way to go.

It's a MSFT tradition to woo some of these guys to the .Net platform. They did it with J++ for Java folks and IronPython for Python fellas. Not very successful but that big camp of JS fellas sorta justifies at least a trial.

I do expect JS support to be cut if it does not get traction from the JS camp.

I suspect the huge push for HTML/JS is to bring those developers in to the Microsoft platform since there's already an extremely large and fairly dedicated crowd from C# and C++ using Microsoft developer tools.

Anyway, lots of good information, but way too much time spent on Javascript.

Something seems to be wrong with the MP4 available for download. At 6 sec into the video, the Video app (on Windows 8) crashes with a NULL pointer exception in msmpeg2vdec.dll. Windows Media Player also crashes at the same point. I tried downloading the MP4 video a second time, but got the same result both times.

I'd really like to watch this video offline, on the plane ride home, so it'd be awesome if you could post a video that doesn't crash on playback. Thanks.

Did you pull down the high or regular quality MP4? I just pulled down the high quality one (617MB) and it played through without any issues (Windows 8, Windows Media Player). I can try it on an ARM device as well, in case that is the issue...

Would have been nice if more time spent in C# wandering through the new bits. I keep hearing JavaScript shouting in the same sentences as win 8. Why? Js & html seems like I'm writing a webpage... Why make it an app then? Maybe its great for someone but I just feel like its not brining out the best.

The folks ridiculing the HTML/JS track for developing Win8 applications need to take a reality pill. There are far more HTML/JS developers out than C#/XAML. My company ported a PhoneGap application targeting iOS and Android in two weeks. By devs with no experience at all with the MS stack or Windows. They all use Mac OS X or Linux.

Those same developers and designers ported an iPad Medical Chart application we created and maintain for a customer written in Objective-C to Windows 8 using the HTML/JS track in 3 months. Granted we are now on version 2 of the iPad application and have years of experience with the customer and their web services. Still outstanding none-the-less.

On the other hand, if you are interested in developing applications for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 with C#/XAML please contact HR at MutualMobile. http://www.mutualmobile.com/company/careers/windows-8-engineering.

All what i just said isn't ment to concern the regular JavaScript programmer. I'm really talking about programming here not utilizing some libraries greatness. Like jQuery for example, without jQuery i would say the whole JavaScript stuff wouldn't be as big as it is. So think about this, the whole point why jQuery and several other libraries exist, is because JavaScript alone isn't a viable option to make serious applications with.

Which results in my Statement from before, if your impression of a JavaScript Html programmer is the guy who writes like 10 lines of JavaScript in his webpage to make it more dynamic using several JavaScript libraries, than i would support what you are saying. But i don't think they will hardly write any application that will be a really value to the platform. Yeah there will be exceptions. Like using php for Facebook than reallizing that php is no good for serious development and writing a php to c++ converter, because you got your self so damn stuck.

So why not requiring from every developer to improve them self, instead of giving them a toy because they are not intrested in getting serious.

There are 120.000 Apps now in Windows Phone Store but 49 are only Really being used by almost every one. If we raise that to 10.000, we still have around 110.000 that are white noise...Maybe i'm old fashioned but i always digg quality over quantity, and i would bet that the quality apps won't be written in JS/Html.

I really understand your point, and i also get this whole acquiring a new user base and such. But i don't think it's worth it.

And the 1 Million apps that result from this to show you real estate from places around you or single book apps or what ever else someone might consider spam, i personally would really like being banned from the platform anyway. This doesn't mean that there are no exceptions to this either, but again, i would say these exceptions wont be JS / Html apps.

Anyway, this really sounds like a rant. But it's more like my experience with JS and my try to really do some serious stuff with it. Which resulted in Getting the SharpDeveloper source and taking the C# parser and writing a C# to JS Converter and also i extended the MVC ViewEngine to make support for inline C# thats converted to JS. Because JS isn't for serious stuff. All libraries are indicating this...

Try writing something like jQuery, ExtJs, etc. your self. And i promise you will know why i'm so concerned about this. Using a library to get something done is always, and specifically in JS, so much easier. But variety and Quality will then depend on those, and if it's to hard todo something special your self, you probably wont do it, especially not if you don't have the time.

Result again, less special, less quality.

I'm sure this will change over time because it always does. Some people will create new libraries especially for Windows8 development. But then u have libraries that are special to JS and Windows8 so no one except JS for Windows8 programmers will benefit from this. And then it will be called JS for Windows 8 a whole new eco system and so on ...

I think its hard to Migrate the existing windows app to a metro app. . . Because I'm doing that migration work, but I'm still in search of replacement for some stuffs like authenticate a person through stream socket on IP and doing chat like that.. But still its very challenging and excited to work in this metro app!..

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